Industrial ecology is an interdisciplinary study of technology, society and ecology that sees industrial systems (for example a factory, an ecoregion, or national or global economy) as being part of the biosphere. It consider it as a particular case of an ecosystem, but based on infrastructural capital rather than on natural capital.
Industrial ecology is the shifting of industrial process from linear (open loop) systems, in which resource and capital investments move through the system to become waste, to a closed loop system where wastes become inputs for new processes.
Much of the research focuses on the following areas:
- material and energy flow studies ("industrial metabolism")
- dematerialization and decarbonization
- technological change and the environment design for the environment ("eco-design")
- life-cycle planning, design and assessment
- extended producer responsibility ("product stewardship")
- eco-industrial parks ("industrial symbiosis")
- product-oriented environmental policy
- eco-efficiency
Industrial ecology proposes not to see industrial systems (for example a factory, an ecoregion, or national or global economy) as being separate from the biosphere, but to consider it as a particular case of an ecosystem - but based on infrastructural capital rather than on natural capital. It is the idea that if natural systems do not have waste in them, we should model our systems after natural ones if we want them to be sustainable.
Along with more general energy conservation and material conservation goals, and redefining commodity markets and product stewardship relations strictly as a service economy, industrial ecology is one of the four objectives of Natural Capitalism. This strategy discourages forms of amoral purchasing arising from ignorance of what goes on at a distance and implies a political economy that values natural capital highly and relies on more instructional capital to design and maintain each unique industrial ecology.
Why do we need Industrial Ecology?
We are in an era of exponential change in world systems; availability of resources for development, destruction of natural capital, release of an increasing variety of toxic materials, climate change, and the impacts of all of these forces on human and natural systems. For instance, plastics from ocean dumping of garbage are disintegrating to a molecular level and entering into food chains. The ocean waters in northern seas are becoming less saline due to ice melting as the result of a warming atmosphere. Decision-makers and citizens need guidance from a systems-based interdisciplinary framework to deal with the complex interactions among such complex systems.